Green Marketing Lessons for Entrepreneurs

I provided a best practice example, which I wrote about in July 2009 , about the use of eco-logos and statistics on the outside envelope of a fundraising appeal by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee , which was signed by former Vice President Al Gore. I then went on to discuss an example of greenwashing by a major company, SC Johnson, in their creation of Greenlist. Terrachoice, a leading environmental marketing agency, defines greenwashing as “the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service.” SC Johnson created the program in 2001 and started putting its Greenlist logo on products in 2008 to indicate that one of their products met certain environmental standards. The problem was that SC Johnson made the logo look very official, which gave many consumers the idea that it was ...